Changemakers: Katerina Tsirimpa

It’s difficult to imagine a world that operates without money or energy. As Head of Corporate Finance at National Grid, the UK multinational electricity and gas utility company, Katerina Tsirimpa CFE2011 has a significant impact on both.

With responsibilities ranging from orchestrating complex international infrastructure financing deals to overseeing relationships with banks, credit rating agencies and joint venture partners, plus handling mergers and acquisitions financing strategy for the FTSE 100 gas and electricity utility, she could be said to be helping in a significant way to keeping the lights on and radiators warm on both sides of the Atlantic.

It’s a role that draws on both her masters degrees – one in business economics and one in politics – and on the qualification in corporate finance she acquired on the London Business School Executive Education programme in 2010.

Initially focused on geopolitics, Tsirimpa was soon equally fascinated by the pivotal role energy plays in the global economy “and how it has shaped the world that we live in”.

Commensurate with their capital importance, energy infrastructure projects are hugely detailed and elaborate affairs, entailing complicated supply chains, billions of dollars of capital from myriad investors, and sometimes the involvement of governments.

Pinning down all the elements of a complex multinational deal can take years of analysis and planning; quite an intellectual and management challenge. Meeting it has brought Tsirimpa’s team awards, as well as the satisfaction of benefiting the lives of huge numbers of people. The awards include three that recognise the complex financing underpinning the North Sea Link, an undersea cable connecting the Nordic and UK energy markets, which was one of 2016’s deals of the year.

A joint venture between Statnett, operator of the Norwegian energy system, and National Grid, the North Sea Link high-voltage, direct-current (HVDC) cable is a project with a total value of €2 billion (£1.76 billion) that will be the longest of its type in the world when it comes into operation in 2021.

One of the first of its type and scale, “it was a really fantastic deal, because there were so many different elements involved, from the suppliers who helped build the assets, to the export agencies in their home countries,” Tsirimpa says. With multiple stakeholders to satisfy and cultural differences to manage, aligning all the elements for a deal like that is “a fine art”, she says, in which there is always plenty to learn and to be added to her “funding toolkit”.

But putting together big deals is about more than just numbers. A commercial mindset helps, but so does the ability to negotiate, focus on goals and manoeuvre for successful trading positions. Yet, in the end, “any good deal means that everybody has to be a winner at the end of it.”